war and the state (was milton, etc.)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 10:33 AM -0400 8/23/02, Gordon Fitch wrote:
>Dennis Robert Redmond:
>>  Nonsense. Russia was a peasant country thrown into the ghastly cauldron of
>>  WW I; no social democracy could exist in the peripheries of the day. The
>>  choice was, build up your industrial base at a terrible human cost, or be
>>  liquidated by Fascism. Stalinism was the result of that situation, not
>>  some bad choice made by a personal leader.
>
>I think you're mixing up two historical periods.  In 1917,
>the external threat was Germany, able to advance into Russia
>but pretty much exhausted by the war and trying to cut a
>deal that would enable them to concentrate on the Western
>Front.  It would be many years before aggressive fascist
>states arrived at the Soviet border.  Meanwhile, had Lenin
>been unusually prescient, he could have proleptically imitated
>the Korean and Taiwanese models of national capitalism.  It
>would have been tricky, simultaneously buying off both his
>own side's radicals and foreign interventionist liberals with
>rhetorical gestures, but he might have gotten lucky.

Had the Russian revolutionaries in 1917 chosen to emulate Japan 
(which had already kicked the Russian asses in the Russo-Japanese War 
of 1904-1905 and emerged as a new imperial power), there would have 
been no anti-fascist power on the Eastern Front.  For all we know, 
the hypothetical national-capitalist Russia might have turned to 
fascism itself in an economic crisis, joined the axis powers, and 
prolonged WW2, if not quite defeating the allied powers in the end.

BTW, in 1917, the external threat was not at all limited to Germany, 
and imperial aggression against the USSR began immediately:

*****   The weight had been accumulating for some time; indeed, since 
Day One of the Russian Revolution. By the summer of 1918 some 13,000 
American troops could be found in the newly-born Union of Soviet 
Socialist Republics. Two years and thousands of casualties later, the 
American troops left, having failed in their mission to "strangle at 
its birth" the Bolshevik state, as Winston Churchill put it.{2} The 
young Churchill was Great Britain's Minister for War and Air during 
this period. Increasingly, it was he who directed the invasion of the 
Soviet Union by the Allies (Great Britain, the US, France, Japan and 
several other nations) on the side of the counter-revolutionary 
"White Army". Years later, Churchill the historian was to record his 
views of this singular affair for posterity:

Were they [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but 
they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian 
soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded 
its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and 
schemed its downfall. But war -- shocking! Interference -- shame! It 
was, they repeated, a matter of indifference to them how Russians 
settled their own internal affairs. They were impartial -- Bang!{3}

(William Blum, _Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions 
Since World War II_, 
<http://members.aol.com/bblum6/introold.htm#beginning>)   *****

To the chagrin of imperialists, the USSR survived the initial 
onslaughts against it.
-- 
Yoshie

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